Personalising your browser homepage
Posted 4 May 2007 at 10:43AM by Simon Dickson in Connecting to the Internet
What's the first thing you see when you open up your browser? A host of companies are now battling for your affections as your 'personalised homepage', with some really neat functionality on offer.
Yahoo's My Yahoo service was probably the first to let you choose content from various providers, and throw it together on your own page. But like a lot of Yahoo services (although not all), it's beginning to look a little dated - particularly as the war between Google and Microsoft opens up on a new front.
Google's personalised service has a new name - iGoogle - and now lets you replace its sterile white appearance with something much prettier. You can apply your choice of theme to your personal page: as the day goes on, the images and colours actually change according to the time of day (and in some cases, the weather where you are). Microsoft's Live.com site lets you change the colour scheme, but it just doesn't come close to iGoogle's cute factor.
Google has also introduced a way to create (admittedly rather basic) 'gadgets', which you can add to your own page or share with friends, without any programming ability: it's nothing special, but it's another way to connect online with your contacts and colleagues.
If you're thinking about going down the personalised route, it's worth having a look at French start-up Netvibes; since they aren't tied to any of the big players, they're free to offer the best elements of each. New features include the ability to create private and public pages, so you could create your own collage of useful information sources, and share it with others.
But whatever you do, don't forget to take details of our RSS feed with you. All these services let you incorporate the latest news headlines from your favourite sites: in most cases, you just need the address of the RSS feed in question, and the homepage will do the rest.
Tags: google, microsoft, personalised homepage, rss, yahoo
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